Wish you were here! Postcards from Prince Harry's Diamond Jubilee tour of the Caribbean

Even the most hard-hearted Republican — Portia Simpson Miller, Jamaica’s Prime Minister, for instance — would have found it hard not to raise a smile as Prince Harry larked about on a running track with the fastest man on Earth, Usain Bolt, this week.

On his Caribbean tour, Harry has come across as a blithe spirit, a contagiously cheerful presence.

Royal aides had been said to be nervous about the Prince’s first tour on behalf of the Queen in her Diamond Jubilee year. There is always a thrillingly unpredictable element to Prince Harry, after all. A sense that anything might happen.

Flash Harry: The prince poses with Usain Bolt in the athlete's signature style at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica

But they needn’t have worried. Suddenly, Prince Harry has shown himself at his personal best. He has unselfconsciously displayed that he can be a winning royal hybrid: a Prince who has both his mother’s empathy — the ease with which she could make an instant connection — and his father’s lively sense of humour.

It wasn’t just the statuesque Miss Bahamas, Anagastia Pierre, who had already told the world she wanted to marry him by the time they were introduced, who thought Harry was ‘hot’.

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Bob Marley’s widow, Rita, called him a ‘gift from God’ and even Mrs Simpson Miller — who hours earlier had been demanding apologies for slavery from the evil British Empire and announcing she wanted to get rid of the Queen as head of state — was reduced to a blushing, hugging schoolgirl at her first meet-and-greet with the Ginger One.

‘We are in love with him, we love him, he’s a wonderful person, such a beautiful person!’ she said, sounding remarkably enthusiastic given her previous rage. She also spotted that he had that rare male quality that women love — he was a good listener. Even the not naturally effusive Usain Bolt decided that Harry was ‘cool’.

Prince Harry has undoubtedly played a blinder. Although in the end that meeting with Mrs Simpson Miller seemed good-natured and even cuddlesome, it was potentially very awkward after her comments on the Empire.

To Harry’s credit, with his personal warmth, he defused the problem. He has shown himself to be a natural ambassador, a diplomat in a very real sense — one hug from him has (at least partly) dissipated the bad feeling of generations.

It is inconceivable that any other Royal could have pulled this off quite so effectively. The Queen and Prince Charles are too formal, either because they’re of a different generation, or out of necessity given her position and that he is next in line to the throne.

William and Kate cannot behave as spontaneously as Harry can. Neither their status as future King and Queen, nor their characters — in William’s case, shy; in Kate’s, demure and keen to please — permit it. But Harry, the ‘spare’, is the Royal Family’s secret weapon and has no such constraints on him.

It is this lack of restraint, his very openness and spontaneity, that has sometimes been his weakness.

But this week’s events show that it may yet turn out to be his greatest strength.

As he is always himself — and that self is playful and affectionate — he is instantly likeable, something we saw during his blue suede shoe reggae dance in Jamaica.

And he was evidently amused when he encountered Nancy Dell’Olio in the line-up to meet him at a state dinner in Kingston on Tuesday night (she had inveigled an invitation while holidaying on the island).

His canny grandmother chose wisely when she handpicked the Caribbean for his first Diamond Jubilee tour because her long experience divined that his character would suit the tempo of the place. How right she was.

Of course, it is just this apparent lack of guile — which can tip into the wildness — that has got him into trouble in the past, when he has fallen out of nightclubs in an overexcited state and had the odd bust-up with paparazzi.

Where he is down-to-earth — shovelling beers and pizza into his trolley in Wal-Mart when he was in California doing helicopter training — he is also a sucker for a pretty face in a bar.

During Apache training in America last year he absconded for the night with a waitress, and was filmed dancing, leaping in and out of a shallow pool, and flirting in a nightclub in Hvar, Croatia, last summer.

Regal bearing: Prince Harry shakes hands with Nancy Dell'Olio at a reception before a state dinner in Kingston

It is unimaginable that the more considered, buttoned-up Prince William would have done any of these things, even when he was a bachelor.

Princess Diana spotted the difference between her two boys early on. She worried that William didn’t want to be King, although he has insisted that was never the case. She thought he would never like the attention.

But her cheeky, emotional youngest child seemed to breeze through the spotlight in a way his more thoughtful elder brother couldn’t. She saw him as outgoing and pragmatic. She called him ‘GKH — Good King Harry’ behind his back because she thought he was a natural, jolly ‘king’ type.

It was even said she thought he might become monarch rather than William. With a mother’s instinct, she has been proved right in one way — at his best, he is certainly a major royal asset.

This side of Harry took a long time to emerge. The little boy who touchingly walked behind his mother’s coffin at her funeral did not flourish at Eton, where he was said to find himself perennially near the bottom of its academic tables. As he told the people of Jamaica this week, he always preferred sport to anything he learned in the classroom.

Hip Harry: The prince dances with Chantol Dormer at a youth community center in Kingston

Knowing he wasn’t obvious university material, he seemed to have an endless year off — in fact, there were two in succession — during which he skied, played polo and fell in love with Africa. He has said before that he doesn’t particularly like England and it is hard to resist the idea that Harry does generally look happier abroad. His favourite charity, Sentebale, which he set up with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, helps vulnerable children in Africa.

With his family background and love of outdoor life and sport, it was not surprising that he joined the military. What was more surprising to the world at large was the seriousness with which he threw himself at his career — insisting on being sent, amid a media blackout, to the front line in Afghanistan, where he will at some point return — and also that he would turn out to be outstandingly good at it.

During the past few months, the academic dud has proved himself, extraordinarily, to be an ace Apache pilot. Just two per cent of military pilots are allowed to fly Apaches, the highest-specification military helicopter, and Harry was top of his class.

Little wonder that he looked so at ease on the rifle range in Jamaica yesterday.It was during his training that the girls of Arizona and Las Vegas were said to be beside themselves with the thought of catching a glimpse of him.

Harrymania boomed after the Royal Wedding when he walked back down the aisle flirting with Pippa Middleton looking for all the world as if he’d just fallen out of the shower with a hangover (you could have sworn his hair was still wet) — which he had, apparently, having had much fun in the bar of the Goring Hotel in Belgravia the night before, including hurling himself over a balcony at 3am.

But just when he could have come across as a bit too informal for such a momentous day, Harry apparently made an unbelievably touching (as well as funny) best man’s speech about his brother in which he told how William had looked after him when they lost their mother. It did end, though, one guest told me, with Harry ‘crowd-surfing’.

A party Prince who is laid-back enough to openly inhale the nitrous oxide in balloons at parties, as he unwisely did 18 months ago, is one who’ll also make Jamaica swoon by posing alongside Usain Bolt and mimicking the runner’s famous ‘Lightning Bolt’ victory stance.

Soldiering on: Harry on the rifle range in Kingston, left, and arriving at a cathedral in Nassau, Bahamas

Although he is yet to find his future Princess — his one serious girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, shared his love of Africa, but not his ease about public scrutiny, and other assorted television presenters and underwear models seem to have just been flings — he has found friendship and family relations easy as a grown-up.

His two great friends are Tom ‘Skippy’ Inskip, who is described by friends as ‘a bit mad, in a Sloaney party way’ and works in the City (he organised that easyJet weekend to Hvar); and ‘Jake’ Warren, nephew of the Earl of Carnarvon who lives at Highclere Castle, better known to most of us as Downton Abbey, and works with horses.

The three of them are both co- owners of a horse, amusingly and appropriately called Usain Colt.

Friends say that Harry is much closer to the Spencers, particularly his aunts, than Prince William is, and that he doesn’t share William’s anxieties about friends keeping his confidences.

At some point in the future, we will see Harry the loose cannon again, misbehaving in a bar or acting as if he’s on a stag night. But with any luck we will also continue to realise that this carefree soul, this pilot Prince, can make a first-class royal ambassador, too.